(or posting this at 11.13pm makes it almost yesterday!)

Safer Internet Day is…

“organised by Insafe in February of each year to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world.”

And so it needs to be in many ways. This doesn’t necessarily impact the work that I do at Fibonacci Designs nor does it impact my use of the web from a personal perspective however the fact that we have this day at all makes it clear that there is risk attached to the Internet (especially for children).

For business this risk seems to be getting more prevalent – probably due to the ever increasing proportion of money spent directly through eCommerce and indirectly through investment in digital products and services that in turn increases the useage of websites.

How does this risk manifest itself?

Well I’ve seen more hacking attempts over the last 6 months than I’ve ever seen before – the injection of malicious code into websites to bring them down, or to promote third part websites. to protect ourselves against risks like these we need to be vigilant with our use of the same password for all the different accounts we are bound to *need* now (don’t do this), we need to change our passwords at least fairly regularly, and we need to try and make our passwords at least slightly cryptic.

For website managers ensuring that security in some form is available – such as locking ftp access out of servers or installing appropriate security software when necessary is a must – to keep us all protected from those nasty hackers out there…

For more information about Safer Internet Day see the website here. For an interesting article entitled ‘What every parent should know about social media’ see the BBC News website click here.